How do you social proof your website and build trust, especially for those who haven’t tried your product yet?

Testimonials: Do you put them in your main page or pricing page? Do you ask for a testimonial or you get them without asking from those who are excited about the product?

Customer list/logos: Did you ask them if they agree to put their logo on your website?

As seen on: Seems very popular. How much do you think it affects the conversions though?

Users/subscribers count: This is interesting. Have you tried widgets like userstats.com? Do you put numbers like this on your pricing page like basecamp does (last week xxxx new accounts) ?

Verified/Secure checkout badges?

A few ideas to debate:
6. Put your last 30 days sales count from stripe on pricing page?
7. Use a widget or something where it says: "24 minutes ago a new sale from NY, USA. " with a link to checkout page. I’ve seen this on subscription boxes.
8. Support average response time, taken directly from your help desk API ?

home page brag: “Helping thousands of online poker players improve their game since 2008”. i should put “helping 7000 online …” but I can’t bring myself to so openly inform my competitors of the size of my business!

(1 & 2) Always ask them if you can put their testimonial/logo on your website. The best time to do this is after you’ve had a good interaction with them - e.g. answered some customer support issue or after they made their first dollar using your product.

(3) “As seen on” builds instant trust in your product. Logos are awesome for this the same way as profile pictures are awesome for testimonials. Best if the logos are in plain grey, so as to not distract the reader.

(4) Makes sense only if you have a large enough number to be impressive. This works on “herd mentality” - if 10,000 users love your product, I think I might love it too. A better number to publish would be some metrics to measure value. e.g. “sent 18,432 invoices last month” [see No 6 below]

(5) Verified/Secure badges would probably work for a non technical crowd. It’s a distraction for technical folks.

(6) Only, if your users care about how many sales you made (and how it benefits them). For e.g. If you are selling on behalf of your customers. For.e.g Gumroad could put something like “Our customers made $8,000,000 in sales this month”.

(7) Helpful if I care about whether other people from specific area/industry are ordering the product. For e.g. If it’s a software product aimed at developers, a “24 mins ago a new sale from a developer at Google Inc” might work wonders.

(8) As a customer I expect not having to contact support at all. So I can’t think of any reason why average response time of 2 minutes would matter to make a purchase decision. You could instead put something relevant about the service you provide. For e.g. DigitalOcean “Deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds.”